Monday, April 6, 2009

No Return, Making Love

Here are the end and the beginning. With the beginning is the ecstatic. With the beginning is the presence of God. But at the end, at this end, there is nothing but the remains, the shards and the fusion of memories into the slag of dullness and loss. The first poem was written late in the day on 22 Dec. The second poem was written at noontime on the 23rd. In the background, my work is coming to an end for the year and perhaps longer. It turned out that my dry spell lasted until the end of February but I never know how long these things will last.

No Return

I look out on glass,Miles, glass molten, then frozenSeas, glass left behindAfter the hot white blast,The wind and black thunderclapOf hopeless despair,Of me losing you,Of you looking back blindlyAfter seeing this day.

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Making Love

Purity and PeaceMade sweet love in the garden.Purity withdrew.Gravid Peace gave birth.The babies lay in the stream,The stars awakened,Kissed the babes awake,And the world sang a new song.

Rachel, I try to discern from this place what I was doing in that one. There is a sleep period in between the poems and I am pretty sure this was the big snow storm in Portland. It took me out of my work, stranded because PDX has no equipment for this big a storm and neither do we. I dug my driveway out bit could not take my car anywhere beyond the few feet of my driveway. I began idle time until the end of February, but that was because we ran out of work too.

If I was trying for balance, then it was unconscious. It is more like my mood swings. I see things to write out of my feelings, I am sure.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.